Eleanor Johnson, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women. Princeton University Press, 2026.
For most people monsters are the stuff of fiction, relegated to the spooky corners of the bookcase. But as Eleanor Johnson shows in her new book Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women, Patriarchy described real women as Monstrous Bitches. Johnson turns these terms into proper nouns because they function as forces with agency; they have evolved in lockstep for four millennia, as Patriarchy has oppressed women by training everyone to think of women as monstrous.
Monstrous Bitches have appeared in many genres: myths, epics, plays, religious texts, witchcraft treatises, poems, novels, and films. Johnson summarizes and analyzes canonical and lesser-known works, from ancient epics with plots as bizarre as they are gruesome to a trunkload of horror movies so that we don’t (all) have to watch them.
According to the author, six cultural shifts rooted in place and time have transformed the Monstrous Bitch. The book spans ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome; medieval and modern Europe, colonial North America, and the United States. It bristles with women who have powerful, spell-casting voices, sexual appetites, and powers over reproduction (when they’re not murdering babies and other people). The Patriarchy punishes them for these attributes, but they never disappear entirely.
Between ancient Mesopotamia and fifth century BCE Greece, she argues, “monstrous magical bitchery…jumped species” from gods and demons (like Lamashtu and Tiamat) to humans, beginning with the spellcasting murderess Medea in Euripides’s eponymous play. What makes Medea scarier, observes Johnson, is that she’s human. Any regular woman could learn sorcery and, if she went the full Medea, betray her king, her husband, and “every man she’s related to by blood.” Johnson’s argument here suggests that Euripides gave men and women reasons to fear women who challenged the Patriarchy. This is chilling reading today, when far-right parties are telling women to fear skilled, assertive, independent, or articulate women. Groups that dehumanize women also co-opt them into voting for their own oppression.
The book’s middle section examines how Christianity and scientific empiricism shaped the Monstrous Bitch trope. Early Christian authors re-framed her power from innate to borrowed from Satan. During the early modern witch hunt state, authorities executed thousands of women for allegedly practicing witchcraft. By the nineteenth century, waning religious belief resurrected a specific Monstrous Bitch: the vampiress. A beautifully undead bloodsucker, she became the body-horror mirror of the Eucharist: the Christian ritual where wafers and wine become (metaphorically or otherwise) Christ’s flesh and blood.
In the final section of the book Johnson turns to film. After women gained the vote in the 1920s in the US and the UK, working and voting women were increasingly at odds with the Victorian image of women as the “Angel in the House.” From the 1930s, horror movies metabolized patriarchal fears about feminists into new kinds of Monstrous Bitches. Drawn from ancient motifs and psychoanalysis, they include human-animal hybrids and vampiresses who craved and possessed women. And yet, there is also a shift in this period to framing some Monstrous Bitches as heroines. By the 1970s witches, female desire, and lesbianism were sometimes portrayed sympathetically or as ways of resisting Patriarchy.
[A]side from its section on Mesopotamian origins, Monstrous Bitch is in fact a history of white examples in the context of how white women experienced Western Patriarchy.
These are all good examples. However, throughout the book and across multiple genres, Johnson is silent on whether Europeans deployed these stories against women of color, and on how contact with these women via Atlantic slavery and in Europe’s colonies affected narratives about white women. She doesn’t address geographical expansion or settler-colonialism, turning points for monster narratives that had cataclysmic consequences for Black and brown women. And aside from its section on Mesopotamian origins, Monstrous Bitch is in fact a history of white examples in the context of how white women experienced Western Patriarchy.
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The closest Johnson comes to addressing Black experience is mentioning that “largely racialized gender violence” underwrote modern gynecology. Indigenous women pass only fleetingly through the Voodoo Woman (1957) discussion, where a white male eugenicist injects an Indigenous woman in order to make the perfect … monster. Johnson doesn’t mention that “voodoo” comes from African-diasporic Haitian vodun, a spiritual practice that inspired Western ideas about zombies that also had a filmic heyday.
A Monstrous Bitch history that ignores how Western Patriarchy monstrified women of color in the age of slavery, empires, and settler-colonialism is incomplete, disappearing women who faced the greatest oppression. Colonial lawmakers defined Black, enslaved women’s children as enslaved and Black even if their fathers were white enslavers. By declaring that these women birthed property, not people, White Patriarchy heaped another layer of monstrification on Black women.
Whiteness, like the Monstrous Bitch, is a product of Patriarchy and white supremacy. The latter goes unmentioned in Monstrous Bitch. White supremacists want more white babies, and work to reduce women’s reproductive autonomy while making pregnancy and childbirth more dangerous. Reflecting that “it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what has caused [today’s] cataclysmic backlash” against women’s rights, Johnson mentions “the phenomenon by which women vote against their own rights and liberties.” But she doesn’t note that this is a white supremacist tactic: these women are calculating their own proximity to whiteness and throwing other people under the bus.
Also absent here is consideration of trans people. Yet they have always been an important part of the ways Patriarchy has invented monstrous women and are currently a prime target of monstrification. The first step in oppressing women is inventing a gender binary. People who show how gender actually exists on a continuum get criminalized or pathologized as physically or psychologically flawed.
Monstrous Bitch’s reader doesn’t learn that Western Patriarchy monstrified Black and brown women’s sexuality, reproductive power, and speech. Johnson never acknowledges that she doesn’t include narratives about women of color, nor does she explain why. By ignoring these women whose experiences are integral for understanding Western Patriarchy, Johnson has effectively declared that they aren’t women. Connections between race, gender, and power analyzed by writers like Sara Ahmed, Kim F. Hall, Saidiya Hartman, and Koritha Mitchell might have offered a foundation for asking how the Monstrous Bitch in white people’s minds shaped how they portrayed women of color.
Monstrous Bitch is therefore a selective account of how the Western Patriarchy constantly re-invents the Monstrous Bitch. Its silences drastically limit the book’s value for readers.
Dr. Surekha Davies is an author, speaker, and historian of European science and exploration specializing in the early Americas, the Renaissance, and the cultural history of monsters. She is the author of Humans: A Monstrous History (University of California Press, 2025) and the prizewinning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, Aeon, Reactor, and elsewhere, and she writes a free newsletter, Strange and Wondrous: Notes from a Science Historian.
